Monthly Archives: October 2012

“Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” is an interactive App / eBook by Al Gore, which covers all the issues surrounding Climate Change. We love books, but the regular variety of book cannot compete, or even be compared to a publication such as this. The production is superb, the content is excellent and engaging; at times stunning, sometimes astounding, factually sobering. The price of this eBook is insignificant, it is so cheap it’s literally going for a song. Buy it to admire the technology. “Our Choice” the eBook by Al Gore is the only publication to showcase the ground-breaking software by Push Pop Press, who have been bought by Facebook and are now “setting off to help design the world’s largest book, Facebook.”

Al Gore’s App “Our Choice” has had an incredible response. To quote tech columnist David Pogue of The New York Times:

“this is one of the most elegant, fluid, impressive apps you’ve ever seen. It’s a showpiece for the new world of touch-screen gadgets.”

If you get this book just to admire the production, that, in itself, is money well spent. Pictures fold open and zoom into maps to show their location, graphs break apart to display details, and of course there are videos etc. This is so much more than the interactive books we’re used to! (remember the kids’ books with buttons that play a nursery rhyme, tabs that make animals pop up, and foil that makes crinkle noise? Ha ha..)

Change the way you think.

Every day we have choices, we chose what we buy, what we eat, who we vote for, where we invest, and who we believe in. We need to be sure we know what we’re choosing, we personally want to have a good understanding of Climate Change issues.

Al Gore has based his views on the views of the vast majority of scientists and specialists in the field of climate change and environmental science. If you want an expert opinion, consult an expert.

The subject will grab you sooner or later, sooner if you’re lucky. We have a wider choice if we chose early. As with everything, the selection diminishes with time, until eventually there is no choice, you just take what is left (if anything is left). Much like eating at a buffet after a horde of teenagers has been; the good stuff is all gone.

The true cost of carbon is so much more than the production cost.

So take a look at “Our Choice”, admire it, learn from it, and let your children play with it. And gift it to everyone you love and your local politicians. Suggest it as the text at a book club, discuss it at dinner or drinks with friends and colleagues, and suggest to teachers that they use it. It’s a great gift for people who need to clarify a few Climate issues, ..and for climate skeptics if you can get them to look at it!

100% of Al Gore’s earnings from Our Choice will be donated to the non-profit Alliance for Climate Protection. “Our Choice” was published by Rodale, produced by Melcher Media, and powered by Push Pop Press★ Winner of the 2011 Apple Design Award ★

The humble candle, for passion and love, Birthdays and Christmas, remembrance, devotion and so many other things. Before electricity, candles were precious, expensive, and lighting a candle had meaning. Now you can get candles very cheaply; but lighting a 10c candle doesn’t seem to have the same meaning. So we light many candles…

When we researched candles to find out which candle is best, we considered as many aspects as we could, giving health the highest priority.

Smoke from paraffin candles is toxic

The common paraffin wax candle was rejected early. Paraffin is a by-product of the petrochemical industry. Dr Peter Dingle (1) found that burning three paraffin wax candles in a room put as much toxins in the air as idling a car in the room. Not good for anyone’s health. It seems it’s healthier to stand by the motorway and breathe in the exhaust fumes! On the plus side, paraffin is very cheap, and you can afford to burn many candles at once, a bit like moving onto the median strip of the motorway and getting the exhaust fumes from all sides.

93% of all soy beans grown in the USA are Genetically Modified.

The new kid on the block, the soy candle, was cited to have Eco credentials, and was enthusiastically researched. The report by USDA which showed that most of the soy produced in the USA is Genetically Modified (2). Exit the soy candles; GM is not supported by us, for many reasons best discussed in a separate article. I can hear you arguing that soy is safe enough to eat… true, some soy is. Most soy is not. If it is non-GM soy, then it’s better to eat it than burn it.

Next we briefly considered palm oil candles. You don’t have to look too far to find that palm oil is grown in many SE Asian countries. If we burn the oil in our candles, more rainforests will be cleared to grow more palms to produce more oil. We need rainforests to stabilise the earth’s atmosphere, they are the lungs of the earth.

Save the rainforests for the Orang utans

They are also the home of the Orangutan, a species close to becoming extinct. Our candle needs are not important enough to go up against that, and we want to feel good when we light a candle. Destroying rainforests doesn’t make us feel good. (3,4)

So far in the candle options, paraffin is out, soy is out, palm oil is out. It’s not looking too good for our birthday cakes!

The final contender is the beeswax candle. The wax made by bees, which coats the side of the ‘frames’ in a commercial beehive, is excellent for your health. It is simply scraped off the hive, warmed and strained to remove any bits of twigs etc., and then moulded or rolled with a cotton wick in the middle. Simple, clean, and it has a divine honey smell (without adding anything to create a smell)

Beeswax candle, pure, clean and naturally honey scented

Many, many bees work hard to make the wax, they are little guys, and although they work fast, we burn candles fast too. On the down side (yes, without the bad there is no relative good), beeswax is more expensive than the other waxes, which means you start to cherish lighting a candle, making the lighting of a candle a more meaningful past-time. Birthday candles are suddenly appreciated more, a candlelit dinner becomes more special, and the candlelit bath becomes a real indulgence. When we have ‘special moments’ any old time, they take the shine away from the real special moments. Let a beeswax candle bring back the passion and love to your special moments. Gaze into its’ mesmerizing flame and breathe in deep, enjoying the non-toxic honeyed air brought to you by many, many busy little bees gathering nectar from the flowers. What could be more delightful, more natural, less processed? As far as being good enough to eat, look into the health benefits of honey, propolis and royal jelly. Just plain good for you!

A candle for love

When you think it through, Beeswax Candles are the champion candle choice. In fact it’s our only candle choice!

There’s a great App for the eco minded, greenies and frugavores alike. This App has permaculture and guerilla gardening at heart! It’s called Berry Hunters, and it’s free for a short time, so check it out now!

Take me to the

I really like this App because it makes use of existing but neglected resources.

It’s easy to add trees to Berry Hunters.

The idea is that when you find a fruit tree, nut tree or berry bush that’s not on private property, you register it using the Berry Hunters App. You can include a photograph of it, which indicates the size and condition of the plant, and where to find it if the location is a bit tricky. The Berry Hunters App uses your phone/ipads’ GPS locator to record where the tree is, or you can enter it manually if you’re not on-location.

Screenshot of Berry Hunters App with tree locations

It’s easy to search the Berry Hunters collection. Use the magnifier in the top right corner to type in a different address. The example shows Cambridge, where it’s been used for a while. The App has been developed in the UK, so to see it in action type your location as London, and see just how much free food is available in a big city! It would be fantastic to see hundreds, no thousands, of food trees logged in Australia.

To expand on this, remember to plant some trees in your area, outside your property. This is a great way to get some of the larger trees, like nut trees, mangoes and avocados, close to you but not in your property where it will overshadow everything else. Your street verge, or the bit of ground at the end of a cul-de-sac, in amongst some bushes in a local park; I’m sure you can think of other places where the tree may be overlooked until it is well established!

Other Berry Hunters can now share in this otherwise wasted bounty, and in return you can see any other free food that’s within a radius of up to 10miles from you current location. Handy if you need a lemon for that fish you’re baking or tart you’re making! Or you can set your location to somewhere else, and register gandma’s tree which hangs over the fence with a load of free lemons or plums or pomegranates (that’s in the apple family, just type in the title). Knowing about a nearby cumquat would have been handy during my last jam making session!